They use this kind.
This site should help. It’s free and a different approach to teaching. I think there should be more programs like this for every subject.
.
Or the flip side, when someone older than I am says I couldn’t possibly be familiar with something because it was before my time. Yes, you’re exactly right. Even though I’m well into adulthood, have a college degree, and edit textbooks for a living, I am completely unaware of anything that happened in the universe before 1967. :rolleyes:
The discussion on this topic bugs me.
If people recognize the form (1-y)(2+x)=? what happens when they are given values for x and y?
x=2
y=4
(1-4)(2+2)=?
(-3)(4)=?
And that’s it? People can’t get past that because they don’t know what operations are left to do? How did they ever get through school? I’m pretty sure my teachers dropped the 8x4 notation when the variable x was introduced, so..grade 7 or 8 or so?
I’m not trying to be mean here, this just genuinely confuses me. I guess that’s kind of the point of this thread - things that seem really simple and obvious that others apparently don’t know.
She is far from stupid, but my sister has some bizarre gaps in her knowledge - geography being one of them, despite the fact that I know that she learned at least as much as I did. Years ago she asked me - before going on a Caribbean cruise - if Somalia was in the Caribbean. She was a little worried about pirates…:smack:
For some reason, when I was young I somehow picked up the idea that “paralyzed” did indeed mean “frozen in place.” Perhaps it’s the sound of the word, perhaps it’s because it was defined to me as “can’t move,” I dunno.
I know better now, of course, but a shadow of that connotation still remains in my brain.
OK, I just did a random astronomy check with my wife. Hmmm. There are 9 planets because the sun is the 9th one. The closest star is a few thousand miles away.
Another from the pet world. ‘‘Is my puppy really a male, it has nipples?’’
How about the people that don’t seem to know that everybody doesn’t use Windows on their computer?
I’ve heard of Sharon Tate, of course, but Dumont, no. Sorry, Eve.
MY obscure knowledge, if you’ll recall, tends towards European royalty. So I tend to get annoyed about the differences between various kings, queens, tsars, emperors, kaisers, etc.
Yep. When I was a kid, I didn’t get how everyone was able to have frozen their limbs in just the right position to use a wheelchair. Of course, I was eight. Adults have no excuse.
One of my professors in colleges was telling us about the time when he was teaching about the Reformation, and when he talked about Martin Luther, one girl asked, “How could he be alive then and still be alive later to free the slaves?”
:smack:
I lol’d. 
In a college class we got on the subject of propaganda. One girl piped up, “Yeah! I’ve got a class with a Russian girl who insists the Russians won World War II!”
Everyone in the class replied, “They did.”
She apparently thought we were just responding in surprise and started telling us how she kept trying to convince this misled classmate the Russians hadn’t won.
Someone finally broke in and said, “The Russians did win!”
We had to explain to her the Russians fought against Germany.
Oh, one just occurred to me.
I went to a Catholic school. One day in class, one girl asked, apropos of nothing, ‘Is the Pope Jewish?’
She’d mistaken the skull-cap he wears for a yarmulke.
Does a bear shit in the kitchen?
Yeah, I’m working that into a conversation this week.
“You think our boss will know how to fix this?”
“Is the Pope Jewish?”
I had a friend who would eat only canned fruit and vegetables. He refused to eat any fresh produce because it grew out of the ground and it was dirty
and bugs had crawled on it. I asked him where he thought canned fruits and veggies come from and he said a factory. I asked where he thought the factories got them and he said they manufactured them.
Group ignorance:
A couple days ago I was having lunch with 4 guys at work.
We were talking about WWII, and I happened to mention about the two atom bombs dropped on Japan.
Everyone else at the table agreed that there had only been one bomb dropped and I must be thinking of one of the tests they did on an atoll or something for the second one.
And of course I got very weird looks when I mentioned little boy and fat man…
I had some roommates in college with odd gaps in their functional knowledge. Roommate #1, otherwise very smart and accomplished, had never baked before and did not know about using oven mitts. He learned fast, I’ll tell you.
Roommate #2 didn’t know how to use a mop. I could see being confused by an unfamiliar vacuum cleaner or a weird washing machine, but a mop? Really? She also didn’t know how to use a toilet plunger.
It gets more complicated that that. Years divisible by 4000 are not leap years. But this rule hasn’t been universally adopted. Some places have just ignored the issue and figure they’ll straighten it out sometime before the year 4000. Other places have adopted an alternate rule that says if you divide the year by 900 and the remainder is 200 or 600, then it’s a leap year. Complicated but it actually works better over the really long run (this rule will keep your calender accurate for tens of thousands of years).
So there could be a problem if we don’t come up with an agreement in the next 788 years. According to one system, 2800 should be a leap year. According to the other system it isn’t.
I figure by then we’ll be using some other system of timekeeping. In the meantime, I’m not going to lie awake at night and worry about it. I have so many other things to worry about.
These conversations are why I love the internet, wikipedia, and smart phones. 25 years ago 4 people would walk away thinking you are the stupid one, and short of a trip to the library or bringing in a copy of an encyclopedia the next day, there was little you could do. Now, I just press a button, say “How many atomic bombs did the US drop on Japan in World War 2?” and the answer is right there.
It’s kind of cheating, but I came away with some true gems from Cameroon. People had a decent excuse for not being up on things (but then again, we aren’t talking about some kind of lost tribe) but it’s just a mind trip to work with such a different base of knowledge where your basic assumptions don’t really work in the same way.
I’ve been asked, in all seriousness, about the precise location of Canada. All the asker knew was that it was in Northern Africa somewhere, probably near Egypt. The assumption was that you could probably take a bus to that place where all the white people come from. I’ve also been told that the United States is a very nice city in Paris.
A friend had a student named “Adolph Hitler.” People didn’t have a lot of fondness for the French, and they knew that Hitler killed French people, so he must have been an okay guy. I was constantly having to convince my students not to draw swastikas on their notebooks.
A high school student asked my friend that if he went to US, at what point would he turn white, and wanted to know how that whole process worked. He knows it worked for Michael Jackson, but why didn’t 50 Cent turn white when he moved to America?
Many, many people expressed that I must be brave to live in the US, what with all the gang wars and terrorism. They said they were glad they lived in Africa where they don’t have to deal with all that violence. Also, there is a widespread belief that the US has a huge vampire problem, and again people are pretty thankful that they don’t have to worry about vampires in Africa.
Once I was called in to proctor and exam on a 120 degree day. It was about as hot as it ever gets, and I was sweating buckets and fanning myself furiously. The teacher I was working with was utterly fascinated. He then asked me “Can you feel the heat, too?” It turns out he thought that white people just didn’t experience heat in the same way, and were relativel indifferent to the extremely hot weather.
It’s complicated. Oliver Sachs has a lovely essay on stereoscopic vision in The Mind’s Eye. Basically there is a lot of variation on how people use stereoscopic vision. Some people live in a richly stereoscopic world, and being one-eyed fundamentally changes the way they experience everything. Others- even people with two perfectly healthy eyes- never use it much and rely on other cues to judge depth. I’m among the latter-I have a dominent eye, and closing the other eye does absolutely nothing to change my vision.